The soldiers of Clone Troop 99 find themselves in uncertain times as the Clone Wars come to an end and the galaxy starts to change around them.

Picking up right at the very end of the Clone Wars – as Kenobi faces General Grievous for the final time and Order 66 gets enacted, The Bad Batch focuses on a small team of clones who aren’t like the others. Specifically, most of Clone Troop 99 are of a ‘mutated’ state – defective clones who don’t just follow orders and do as they’re told like all their brethren. In the grand tradition of sci-fi properties since time immemorial, this of course marks them out an elite force who can beat forces many times their size, and who are introduced as evening the odds between an overwhelmed army of their comrades and an attacking force of Separatist Droids, right up until Order 66 is enacted and things start going sideways.

As far as the batch themselves goes, there are few surprises. Squad leader Hunter is the quintessential example of the all-rounder who is very good at what he does but also isn’t quite sure he’s on the right side. Wrecker is the large, simple brawler with a penchant for blowing things up. Tech is the brains of the group, always occupied with some device or other and reliably on hand to provide exposition where needed. Crosshair is the laconic sniper of the group and the one who doesn’t seem to have any issue with Order 66 or the new Empire, and Echo is the odd one out – the non-mutant (or ‘reg’) clone who was seconded to the troop after a battlefield injury that saw him extensively rebuilt and losing a lot of the cranial ‘programming’ of the Clones.

Isolated from the conditioning of the rest of the Clone armies, the group aren’t compelled to follow Order 66 and are therefore somewhat confused when it all kicks off. Returning to Kamino, they are surprised to find the world around them changing rapidly, as Palpatine consolidates his power and founds the new Galactic Empire. A visit from Tarkin to ‘evaluate’ the Clones as a whole leads to the squad being put to the test in more ways than one to prove their loyalty to the new order.

In the course of one of those tests, decisions are made which will have ramifications for the whole squad.

None of this is bad. Dave Filoni clearly relishes being able to play in the Star Wars sandbox and expand once again on the mythos he helped create with the Clone Wars TV show, itself held by many to have somewhat retrospectively evened out the overall quality of the franchise as a whole after the mixed reception received by the prequel trilogy of films. The problem is, there’s nothing really new here, which leaves me wondering what the point is. We’ve seen these kind of stories before. We’ve seen them in this IP before, for that matter. Conflicted soldiers, cute but fierce sidekicks, and so on. The characters feel very stereotypical and the plot just rolls from one predictable beat to the next and you wonder – ‘does this really add anything of value to the Star Wars story as a whole?’

In terms of aesthetic, it’s pure Clone Wars, from the overexcited movie serial voiceover intro to the animation style, music, themes and character types. As far as the Batch themselves, the explanation we have – that they are somehow a ‘mutant’ strain of clone, and also conveniently the last of their kind – doesn’t really give us much that hasn’t been done elsewhere either. It’s an enjoyable enough romp for a Star Wars fan, I suppose, but it feels dragged out given the length of this pilot (75 mins) and the lack of anything that feels fresh or unique, either for the franchise or the genre as a whole.

Verdict: People often wonder whether Disney might over saturate the Star Wars IP, and this feels like the start of that. A reasonable enough show that doesn’t really add anything to the IP as a whole and does nothing we haven’t already seen before. 6/10

Greg D. Smith